Q and A: Spotify CEO talks Metallica and music discovery

Dec. 6, 2012
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Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek. / Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY

by Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY

by Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY

At a press event in New York, Daniel Ek, the founder and CEO Spotify, unveiled tools to help users of the popular global music streaming service discover new music. And he announced a coup for the service: Spotify struck a deal with longtime online music holdout Metallica to make all of the band's music available for streaming. Following the event, Ek sat down with USA TODAY Personal Tech columnist Edward C. Baig to discuss the news. What follows has been edited for space and clarity:

How long has the Metallica deal in the works?

I started hanging out with Lars (Metallic founder Ulrich) a few months ago and we started talking about it. It really grew as me, Sean (Napster co founder Parker) and Lars just started spending time together and enjoying each other's company. It was pretty clear that..we had a like-minded view.

Does Metallica draw in other holdout artists?

Oh definitely. Metallica has been the poster child of not doing things online. Mostly not for greedy reasons but for creative reasons. That's the part of the story that was never told. But the fact that they've come onto Spotify now-a lot of these other bands like (Led) Zeppelin and others - it's for exactly that reason. It's not for money. They want control over how their listeners hear their stuff.

Is signing Zeppelin around the corner?

We're trying to sign all of them, that's all I can say.

We don't have any Beatles. We do have Paul McCartney.

He's one of the folks you can "follow?"

Yea exactly he's one of the influencers so you can see what kind of playlists he's created and what kind of music he's inspired by. It's pretty cool.

The new Discover tab you've added-we've seen elements of that on other services including Apple's unsuccessful Ping. Why will this work?

In order for a service to be social, you've really got to start from the ground up. The fact that almost a third of the U.S. population have even heard of Spotify is really because they've seen it on Facebook and friends have been sharing. We are already very successful at social. But what we realized is some of your friends have great music tastes but it turns out some of them don't. So who then really knows about music? Artists know about music of course and music editors and trendsetters.

My (personal) experience on Spotify was great because I have all these artists and tastemakers as friends. We were thinking how do we expose that to all other users?

And that's where the idea was born that you can follow anyone on Spotify including artists and music influencers. Most people, even if they don't share music themselves, want to see what other people are sharing.

We've seen celebrity playlists on iTunes of course.

The key here is already day one on Spotify these artists have enormous reach. Example: This is different because we really believe that the way to do this is by building a social service and other services from the ground up. That wasn't the case (on other services). Users are really not going to get in bed unless it's a core part of the experience.

How do you go beyond just a list of `if you like this, you'll like that?

One of the things is social. You're seeing this because Bruno Mars wanted you to see this, and you're following him. The other one is we don't just look at what you listen to, we actually know a lot about you already because a lot of our users sign up through Facebook.

I'm 29 years old. I was 9 years old when this band Kris Kross really broke through. This notion of "past" on the Internet...what happened in the past is something that's going to get really big but isn't really there right now. If you look at Twitter and Facebook, it's just what happened the last second, the last minute, etc. But when you say I care as much about Beatles music today as someone would have done 20 years ago, or Metallica. And that's the beauty of music because it's timeless. So rediscovery is something that's super important. Marry that with social and you've got something that's just nowhere else.

Some of the strongest moments we have in our life is the first time we kissed someone what kind of music were you listening to. I want to reconnect those memories and moments. That's our mission in life-bring the right music every moment into people's lives.

Do you consider Apple a rival and all these other cloud services?

Music is music-I think Apple as a company is doing so many things. Doing videos and all of these things. We're just focusing on music. We still have a pretty big job to do in getting the industry back to where it used to be. We're 100% focused on that and I'm not sure Apple is.

There are other music services-but its obvious we're doing super well here in the US and other markets too. Music is huge. There's more than 1 bill people listening to music now around the world-half a billion online and plenty of room for all of us to grow.

What does this feel like for you personally?

I grew up in Sweden. I'm just the same old guy as when I started this. All I want is to listen to great music and want every single person in the world to feel what I feel.

What are you listening to these days?

Metallica of course. I'm quite eclectic. (Grammy nominated artist) Frank Ocean (who performed at the press event). I'm really into this New Zealand artist called Kimbra.

How do you pitch Spotify to prospective users?

Up until this (event), it's the jukebox in the sky, where you have all the world's music and you can instantly access it for free. If want to take it with you, (it's) the price of two coffees, $9.99 month and download as many songs as you want on your phone. What Spotify is doing now is just bringing you the right music for the right moment. Yes, you can listen to any song in the world but it also magically figures out what you might want to listen to. And see what a lot of really interesting people are sharing in music.

We're in beta now and gradually roll (the new features out in the new year) on all of our platforms.